Critical readings of Dr Faustus through time (1675-1908)

Included here are twelve historical responses to Christopher Marlowes play Dr Faustus.
They were written between 1675 and 1908. You might find it useful to use the following
prompts to focus your reading and analysis of the critics responses.
1. Read the critical responses to Dr Faustus and make a note of what the critic seems to be
most interested in. What insights do you gain into his work from reading each piece of
criticism? What do you learn about the critic writing?
A set of Critical Position cards is included at the end of this article. These outline in a
simplified form, some of the interests of critics who read texts from a particular critical
position, for example Feminism or Marxism. You can also download and print out this set of
Critical Position cards.
2. Read through the Critical Position cards and make sure you understand the gist of what
each one means.
3. Re-read the critical responses to Dr Faustus and decide which of the critical positions each
critic is drawing on or is sympathetic towards whether he knows it or not! You may decide
that none of the Critical Position cards describes the way in which a particular critic is reading,
in which case try and do this in your own words. (For example, a critic might be very
interested in the social class a writer comes from, but have little sympathy with a Marxist
critic.)
4. In what ways have responses to Keats changed and in what ways have they stayed the
same since his poems were first published over 180 years ago?
Reading one
Christopher Marlow, a kind of second Shakesphear (whose contemporary he was) not only
because like him he rose from an actor to be a maker of plays, though inferior both in fame,
and merit; but also because in his begun poem of 'Hero and Leander', he seems to have a
resemblance of that clean, and unsophisticated Wit, which is natural to that incomparable
poet; this poem being left unfinished by Marlow, who in some riotous fray came to an untimely
and violent end, was thought worthy of the finishing hand of Chapman; in the performance
whereon nevertheless he fell short of the spirit and invention with which it was begun. Of all
that he bath written to the stage his Dr. Faustus hath made the greatest noise with its Devils,
and such like tragical sport, nor are his other two tragedies to be forgotten, namely, his
Edward the Second and Massacre at Paris, besides his Jew of Malta, a tragic-comedy.
Edward
Phillips,
1675
Reading two
Christopher Marlow was ... not only contemporary with William Shakespear, but also, like him,
rose from a Actor, to be a maker of Comedies and Tragedies, yet was he much inferior to
Shakespear, not only in the number of his Plays, but also in the elegancy of his Style. His pen
was chiefly employed in Tragedies [lists Tamburlaine 1 and 2, Lust's Dominion, Massacre,
Jew, Dido]. But none made such a great noise as his Comedy of Doctor Faustus with his
Devils, and such like tragical Sport, which pleased much the humors of the Vulgar. He also
began a Poem of 'Hero and Leander'; wherein he seemed to have a resemblance of that
clear and unsophisticated Wit which was natural to Musaeus that incomparable Poet. This
Poem being left unfinished by Marlow, who in some riotous Fray came to an untimely and
violent end, was thought worthy of the finishing hand of Chapman ... in the performance
whereof, nevertheless he fell short of the Spirit and Invention with which it was begun.
William
Winstanley
, 1687
Reading three
One of Marlowe's tragedies is The tragical history of the life and death of doctor John
Faustus. A proof of the credulous ignorance which still prevailed, and a specimen of the

subjects which then were thought not improper for tragedy. A tale which at the close of the
sixteenth century had the possession of the public theatres of our metropolis, now only
frightens children at a puppet-show in a country-town. But that the learned John Faust
continued to maintain the character of a conjuror in the sixteenth century even by authority,
appears from a 'Ballad of the life and death of doctor Faustus the great conjerer,' which in
1588 was licenced to be printed by the learned Aylmer bishop of London.
Thomas
Warton,
1781
Reading four
The growing horrors of Faustus are awfully marked by the hours and half hours as they expire
and bring him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony
and bloody sweat.
Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the
Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been delectable food: to wander in
fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to
be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the
tree of know-ledge. Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the conjurer, are offsprings of a mind
which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a
believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a character though but in fiction.
But the holiest minds have sometimes not thought it blameable to counterfeit impiety in the
person of another, to bring Vice in upon the stage speaking her own dialect, and, themselves
being armed with an Unction of self-confident impunity, have not scrupled to handle and
touch that familiarity which would be death to others.
Charles
Lamb, 1808
Reading five
His Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his
greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. This character may
be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed
beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, and, as it were, devoured by a
tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to
extend his power with his knowledge. He would realise all the fictions of a lawless
imagination, would solve the most subtle speculations of abstract reason; and for this
purpose, sets at defiance all mortal consequences, and leagues himself with demoniacal
power, with 'fate and metaphysical aid.' The idea of witchcraft and necromancy, once the
dread of the vulgar and the darling of the visionary recluse, seems to have had its origin in the
restless tendency of the human mind, to conceive of and aspire to more than it can atchieve
by natural means, and in the obscure apprehension that the gratification of this extravagant
and unauthorised desire, can only be attained by the sacrifice of all our ordinary hopes., and
better prospects to the infernal agents that lend themselves to its accomplishment. Such is
the foundation of the present story. Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once and for a
moment, for a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in
exchange his soul and body to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he fancies, becomes
by this means present to his sense: whatever he commands, is done. He calls back time past,
and anticipates the future: the visions of antiquity pass before him, Babylon in all its glory,
Paris and Oenone: all the projects of philosophers, or creations of the, poet pay tribute at his
feet: all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure, and of learning are centered in his
person; and from a short-lived dream of supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an
abyss of darkness and perdition. This is the alternative to which he submits; the bond which
he signs with his blood As the outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is
abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular; and the style halts and staggers under
them, 'with uneasy steps'; 'such footing found the sole of unbiest feet.' There is a little
fustian and incongruity of metaphor now and then, which is not very injurious to the subject ....
The intermediate comic parts, in which Faustus is not directly concerned, are mean and
grovelling to the last degree. One of the Clowns says to another: 'Snails! what hast got there?
A book? Why thou can'st not tell ne'er a word on 't.' Indeed, the ignorance and barbarism of
the time, as here described, might almost justify Faustus's overstrained admiration of
learning, and turn the heads of those who possessed it, from novelty and unaccustomed

excitement, as the Indians are made drunk with wine! Goethe, the German poet, has written a
drama on this tradition of his country, which is considered a master-piece. I cannot find, in
Marlowe's play, any proofs of the atheism or impiety attributed to him, unless the beliefs in
whitchcraft and the Devil can be regarded as such; and at the time he wrote not to have
believed in both, would have been construed into the rankest atheism and irreligion. There is
a delight, as Mr. Lamb says, 'in dallying with
interdicted subjects'; but that does not, by any means, imply either a practical or speculative
disbelief of them ....
William
Hazlitt,
1820
Reading six
The well known fact that our early dramatists usually borrowed their fables from novels or
histories to which they serviely adhered, has been thought no derogation from their merits.
Yet the latest biographer of Marlowe dismisses Faustus as unworthy of his reputation chiefly
because it 'closely follows a popular romance of the same name.' Certain it is that Marlowe
has 'closely followed' the prose History of Doctor Faustus; but it is equally certain that he was
not indebted to that 'History' for the poetry and the passion which he has infused into his play,
for those thoughts of surpassing beauty and grandeur with which it abounds, and for that
fearful display of mental agony at the close, compared to which all attempts of the kind by
preceding English dramatists are 'poor indeed.' In the opinion of Hazlitt, Faustus, though an
imperfect and unequal performance, is Marlowe's greatest work.' Mr. Hallam remarks, 'There
is an awful melancholy about Marlowe's Mephistophiles, perhaps more impressive than the
malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe. But the fair form of Margaret is
wanting.' In the comic scenes of Faustus (which are nearly all derived from the prose 'History'
we have buffoonery of the worst description; and it is difficult not to believe that Marlowe is
answerable for at least a portion of them, when we recollect that he had inserted similar
scenes in the original copy of his Tamburlaine.
Alexander
Dyce, 1850
Reading seven
Dr Faustus has many magnificent passages, such as Marlowe of the mighty line could not fail
to write; but on the whole it is wearisome, vulgar, and ill-conceived. The lowest buffoonery,
destitute of wit, fills a large portion of the scenes; and the serious parts want dramatic
evolution. There is no character well drawn. The melancholy figure of Mephistophilis has a
certain grandeur, but he is not the Tempter, according to the common conception, creeping to
his purpose with the cunning of the serpent; nor is he the cold, ironical 'spirit that denies'; he
is more like the Satan of Byron, with a touch of piety and much repentance. The language he
addresses to Faustus is such as would rather frighten than seduce him.
The reader who opens Faustus under the impression that he is about to see a philosophical
subject treated philosophically, will have mistaken both the character of Marlowe's genius and
of Marlowe's epoch. Faustus is no more philosophical in intention than the Jew of Malta, or
Tamburlaine the Great. It is simply the theatrical treatment of a popular legend, a legend
admirably characteristic of the spirit of those ages in which men believing in the agency or the
devil would willingly have bartered their future existence for the satisfaction of present
desires. Here undoubtedly is a philosophical problem, which even in the present day is
constantly presenting itself to the speculative mind. Yes, even in the present day, since
human nature does not change, forms only change, the spirit remains; nothing perishes, it
only manifests itself differently. Men, it is true, no longer believe in the devil's agency; at least,
they no longer believe in the power of calling up the devil and transacting business with him;
otherwise there would be hundreds of such stories as that of 'Faust'. But the spirit which
created that story and rendered it credible to all Europe remains unchanged. The sacrifice of
the future to the present is the spirit of that legend. The blindness to consequences caused by
the imperiousness of desire; the recklessness with which inevitable and terrible results are
braved in perfect consciousness of their being inevitable, provided that a temporary pleasure
can be obtained, is the spirit which dictated Faust's barter of his soul, which daily dictates the
barter of men's souls. We do not make compacts, but we throw away our lives; we have no
Tempter face to face with us offering illimitable power in exchange for our futurity: but we
have our own Desires, imperious, insidious, and for them we barter our existence, for one

moment's pleasure risking years of anguish.

The story of Faustus suggests many modes of philosophical treatment, but Marlowe has not
availed himself of any: he has taken the popular view of the legend, and given his hero the
vulgarest motives. This is not meant as a criticism, but as a statement. I am not sure that
Marlowe was wrong in so treating his subject; I am only sure that he treated it so. Faustus is
disappointed with logic, because it teaches him nothing but debate, with physic, because he
cannot with it bring dead men back to life, with law, because it concerns only the 'external
trash', and with divinity, because it teaches that the reward of sin is death, and that we are
all sinners. Seeing advantage in none of these studies he takes to necromancy, and there
finds content; and how?
[Quotes I, i. 94-98.]
There may in this seem something trivial to modern apprehensions, yet Marlowe's audience
sympathized with it,
G.H.Lewes,
1864
Reading eight
To Faustus, in the suggestion of the Tempter, the words 'knowing good and evil' grow dim in
the unhallowed splendour of the promise 'Ye shall be as gods.' All secrets of Nature and of
Fate he desires to penetrate, but not in order that he may contemplate their mysteries in
philosophic calmness, not that he may possess his soul in the serene light of ascertained
primal truths; rather it is for the lordship over men and things which knowledge places in his
hands that he chiefly desires it. Logic, law, physic, divinity, have yielded their whole stores
into his keeping, but they have left his intellect unsatisfied, craving for acquisition of a less
formal, a more natural and living kind, and they have afforded him no adequate field, and but
feeble instruments for the display of the forces of his will. It is magic which with every
discovery to the intellect unites a corresponding gift of power:
Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.
What is knowledge worth if it does not enable him to obtain mastery over gross matter, over
the lives and fortunes of men, over the elements of air and earth, of fire and water, and over
the strong elemental spirits? To be surrounded with proofs and witnesses of the transcendent
might of his own will, this is the ultimate desire of Faustus, as in other circumstances and
seeking other manifestations, it was of Tamburlaine. But the scholar does not ever disappear
in the magician. In the first heated vision of the various objects towards which the new agency
at his command might be turned, projects rise before him of circling Germany with brass, of
driving the Prince of Parma from the land, and reigning 'sole king of all the provinces;' yet
even in that hour there mingle with more vulgar ambitions the ambitions of the thinker and the
student; he would have his subject spirits resolve him of all ambiguities, and read to him
strange philosophies. The pleasure, which afterwards he seeks, less for its own sake than to
banish the hated thought of the approaching future, is the quintessence of pleasure. He is not
made for coarse delights. He desires no beauty but that of 'the fairest maid in Germany,' or
the beauty of Helen of Troy
And in the scene of parting with the two scholars, immediately preceding the uncompanioned
agony of the doomed man's latest hour a scene distinguished by a lofty pathos which we find
nowhere else in Marlowe there is throughout an atmosphere of learning, of refinement, of
scholarly urbanity, which makes us feel how thoroughly Marlowe had preserved his original
conception of the character of Faustus, even while he degraded him to the low conjuror of
certain passages, introduced by a writer singularly devoid of humour, to make sport for the
groundlings of the theatre.
Edward
Dowden,
1870
Reading nine
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus probably written before 1590, exhibits Marlowe in a
higher vein of workmanship. I think it must be acknowledged that here he wields the right

elements and processes of tragic effect with no ordinary subtlety and power. Faustus, the
hero. is a mighty necromancer, who has studied himself into direct communion with
preternatural beings, and beside whom Friar Bacon sinks into a tame forger of bugbears. A
Good Angel and a Bad Angel figure in the piece, each trying to win Faustus to his several
way. Lucifer.is ambitious to possess 'his glorious soul,' and the hero craves Lucifer's aid, that
he may work wonders on the Earth. At his summons, Mephistophilis, who acts as Lucifer's
prime minister, visits him to negotiate an arrangement. I must quote a brief passage from their
interview:
[Quotes I, iii, 65-99.]
This passage, especially the hero's cool indifference in questioning about things which the
fiend shudders to consider, has often struck me as not altogether unworthy to Milton...:
H.N
Hudson,
1872
Reading ten
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is then the earliest literary work extant purporting to
treat of the Wittenberg savant and conjuror terms almost synonomous in the age in which
he lived. To the average mind of the fifteenth century, astronomy and astrology, chemistry
and alchemy, signified exactly the same thing; in fact, our prosaic and matter-of-fact
ancestors cared very much more for the arts of divination, the transmutation of metals, and
the secret of perpetual youth than for any abstract idea of science. What may be called the
poetry of science, the love of knowledge for its own sake, is a recent invention, like the love of
picturesque scenery, and the arts of spelling accurately, and speaking decently and modestly.
Some of these last are not very widely distributed even now, any more than a knowledge of
the difference between science and quackery. In queer lower strata lurk 'survivals' of the
thoughts and customs of centuries long gone by, changed a little as to outward form and
expression, but in essentials just as of old. There are thousands of people now in England
who know no more difference between astronomy and astrology than their ancestors of four
hundred years ago. White witches are yet to be found in Devonshire, and gipsies everywhere
that a silver spoon is to be picked up. More than this, the present Astronomer Royal, like
Flamsteed, who lived a century and a half before him, is besieged with requests to find lost
linen and spoons, to take the stars off a favourite son who has a strange knack of losing his
watch when he goes to market, to fix the planets for a pet daughter, or to find the
whereabouts of stolen property. A yearly average arrives at the Observatory at Greenwich of
letters containing droll requests of this kind, proving that vulgar human nature is profoundly
penetrated with the wisdom of Buckles apothegm that the chief use of knowledge of the past
is to predict the future. In a rough kind of way these good people agree with the philosopher,
A W Ward,
1874
Reading eleven
There is no attempt at profound philosophy in this play, and in the conduct of it Marlowe has
followed the prose history of Dr. Faustus closely, even in its scenes or mere buffoonery.
Disengaged from these, the figure of the protagonist is not without grandeur .... I may be
reading into the book what is not there, but I cannot help thinking that Marlowe intended in
this to typify the inevitably continuous degradation of a soul that has renounced its ideal, and
the drawing on of one vice by another, for they go hand in hand like the Hours. But even in
his degradation the pleasures of Faustus are mainly of the mind, or at worst of a sensuous
and not sensual kind. No doubt of this Marlowe is unwittingly betraying his own tastes...
James
Russell
Lowell,
1887
Reading twelve
But the unity of tone an purpose in Dr Faustus is not unrelieved by change of manner and
variety of incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labour as of relish, are
for the most part scarcely more than transcripts, thrown into the form of dialogue, from a
popular prose History of Doctor Faustus; and therefore should be set down as little to the
discredit as to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language can stand

beside this tragic poem it has hardly the structure of a play for the qualities of terror and
splendour, for intensity of purpose and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example,
the intense perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of
mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of words the most choice and
perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of simplicity in Marlowe's conception and expression
of the agonies endured by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the
highest note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness and propriety, to the sheer
straightforwardness of speech in which his agonising horror finds vent ever more and more
terrible from the first to the last equally beautiful and fearful verse of that tremendous
monologue which has no parallel in all the range of tragedy.
AC
Swinburne,
1908
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